Filming Years 18901900s
by zecoathediesel
Summary: Inspired from the Video Game Years. In this new series, it's just a documentary of the film industry. But instead of going year by year. It'll be decade by decade. In this series I'll be writing facts about people's favorite director, actor/actresses, and movies. I'll also be covering anything connected to film industry such as real wars, rise of television and more.
1. Preface

Film History

1890/1900

Idea of motion/persistence of vision

Invention of motion camera

Thomas Edison and William K. L. Dickson

George Melies

Birth of Theaters

A Trip to the Moon

The Great Train Robbery

Edward S. Porter


	2. Introduction

Before motion cameras or movies exist, people first had to wonder the idea behind motion one of the things that was important was you need some form of image and then if you close with your eye you will see something moving. For example, if you take something like a Fidget Spinner and you spin it, you'll notice on how fast it goes you get the feeling that you getting a sense of motion with it. This is something known as persistence of vision.

Persistence was first described by a Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus and was explored more in 19th century by Joseph Antoine from an invention he made called the Fantascope which is a wheel that has picture and if you spin the wheel you can see the pictures move, considered to be an early step for animation and there several other different types made invented by different people. In 1872 a British photographer, Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by California senator, Leland Standford to answer a question, "When a horse gallops, does all four of it's hooves leave the ground?" So Muybridge set up 24 cameras and when the horse ran by the cameras, the shutter activated and with the pictures Muybridge was able to create a device called the Zoogyroscope where people can view the horse in motion. This was one of the key factors to inspire people to create movies. Muybridge went and made other motion pictures like this and you can find most of them on YouTube.

Finally, the last person to help put the final pieces in motion picture was George Eastman, founder of the Kodak Camera. Eastman introduce a camera that was portable, easy to buy and to take picture using a thing that would be use today, the film role. This would be the key integrated to make a film, and with the film role not only will it film anything, but anyone can take a picture, with the tag line from Kodak, "You just push a button and we'll do the rest." So with all the pieces on making a film, it was time for history to be made.


	3. Kinetoscope

With the works done by Muybridge, Eastman, and anyone else that had a connection to the camera or some kind of pre-film work. Thomas Edison would be impressed and inspired to created a camera where its main purpose is to just film something and find a way for anyone to see the film itself. So Edison turned to a young Scottish man, William K. L. Dickson to create two machines. One for filming and the other for showing.

So William, along with his assistant, Charles Brown, made two machines. First machine they created was the Kinetograph. Thanks to George Eastman and his works on the roll film, this machine was the one that would film and capture some type of movement. There's a debate on when the Kinetograph came out. Some say June of 1889 others say November of 1890. Well regardless, the Kinetograph used a 35mm film and it had sprocket to help capturing still image and it would continue to take more and more pictures with would later use to create motion.

They tested the camera in a short called "Monkeyshines" and in 1891 a prototype for the second machine the Kinetoscope was created. It was first demonstrated at the Federation of Women's Club with a short little film known as "Dickson Greeting"which features William Dickson himself taking off his hat and bowing. After which Dickson went back to improve the Kinetoscope and work on the coin slot for the machines, when it was completed it was shown again, but this time to a more wide public at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893. Then on April 14, 1894, the first public Kinetoscope parlor was in New York City. After that the product took off from there. They became popular for a while and they were appearing in not only parlors or carnivals, but they were also at hotel lobbies, and even went global to places like Paris and London.

The Kinetophone was some sort of add on to the Kinetoscope, in which this machine was an attempt to bring sounds into a movie. About 45 of the machines were made and tested around 1894-1895 and it was a massive failure. The point of the Kinetophone was almost like a normal Kinetoscope, accept this one has earphones for people to put on and as they watch the film they would hear the sound, but the major drawback to them was the sounds did a very poor job on synchronizing the sound with the picture and around this time better synchronizing devices were being made, so the Kinetophone was very short lived and it would take a lot more years before we finally have synchronize sounds in movies.


	4. Lumiere Brothers

After the success of the Kinetoscope, other people saw how popular the device was and decided to also go into the film business. On February 12th, 1892, a French guy, by the name of Leon Bouly, patent a new and improved motion picture camera to which he dubbed the cinematographe. However, due a lack of money, he was not able to created his dream camera. So he sold the rights and the name to two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere. With the rights and seeing Edison and Dickson's Kinetoscope, the Lumiere brothers wanted to improve the problems with the Kinetoscope and make their own camera and projector.

One of the problems with the Kinetoscope was the weight. This was a very heavy machine so it was impossible to move the thing if you wanted to film something outside. The Lumiere brothers fixed the issue by making the camera more lighter and more portable and they also put a hand crank on the camera so now you take this camera pretty much anywhere you want and film anything you want. They tested the camera by filming at their family-owned factory in Lyon. They made 10 films total with the camera and they showed them to the public, but this time they showed their films to more than just one person at a time. With a projector combine with the camera, they first shows these films to 200 people on March 22, 1895. There films were 35mm and they ran about 16 frames per sec, which was a normal speed for films at the time. Later the brothers showed the films again at a paid public place on December 28, 1895. Thanks to the Lumiere brothers, the project would soon replace the Kinetoscopes and make way for movie theaters with projectors such as Vitascope Hall. However, unlike other directors, the Lumiere brothers didn't think that films were going to continue. They thought that films were just a fad and they would soon go away, so they never made another film again and they didn't even want to sell their invention to anyone.

Of course films are still here and of course more people would add new elements of the genre to make it more fresh and the bring a challenge as you'll see in the next chapter.


	5. Georges Melies

After the first private screening of the Lumiere Brother's films, the audiences were so impressive that some of them wanted to buy the camera and projector from the Lumiere brothers to make their own film. But as stated last chapter, the Lumiere brother believed that film was going to fade away later on and refused to sell the camera to any of the audiences including future director, Georges Melies. So George made up his mind and went with his future wife and friends to find a camera and a projector to make some films. For a camera, his future wife, Jehanne d'Alcy found an Animatograph invented by Robert W. Paul in London. Meiles purchased the camera and he study and modified the camera to make his own film camera. For the projector, Melies and his friends, Lucien Korsten and Lucien Reulos painted a projector known as the Kinetographe a cast iron camera-projector.

With the equipment ready, Melies and his team set out to make some films, at first the films were just people doing basic things, like a woman washing herself, a group of men playing cards, it was just something that people have already seen, but one day while Melies was recording something off the streets his camera jammed in the middle of a take, after he fixed the camera and he look over the film he saw that while he was un-jamming the camera he notice that the bus and women were changed into a horse and men. After witnessing this moment, Melies had a brilliant idea that would make him famous. Before he was a filmmaker Melies first job was a magician and Melies would always look for new ways to from art and illusions for his tricks and make even bigger and better magic happen behind the camera. In most of Melies films he would explore a new style of editing and film tricks he would come up with to impress the audiences. One editing style he's most known for is the stop tricks, where he would film one scene with some sort of object or person and in the next scene the object or the person would change into something else. Melies would sometimes committed on how much hard work would go with these effects, like the multiple exposures where he would making copies of a certain person as they interact with one another in the final production. For this effect you have to be really creative and careful as well. This effects needs careful timing and body position as to where is this body going to go and who or what would it interact with, and as Melies noted that even if you work very hard, if the sprocket brakes you have to start all over again, as repairing the sprocket was impossible.

Dang, it makes me glad we have flash drives and computers now to solve that problem. Still, it is crazy and admirable that someone would create the video again if everything else falls apart.

Anyway, with the special effects, Melies was also credited as the first director to direct narrative or fantasy films. When his films aren't just magic tricks, or him trying out a new effect, Melies would use these effects to tell a story. Sometimes the story would be a fiction one like Cinderella or a Trip to the Moon, and sometimes the stories would be based on a real event. The Dreyfus Affair is a film that was based on a true event that was going on at the time where a Jewish French artillery officer was accused for being a spy and was put on trial and Melies believed that the man is innocent so he wanted this film to be as real as possible and to make the character look also innocent to the people watching the film. In fact it was so realistic, that audiences believe that they were watching a documentary of the events, and it is regarded as the first politically engaged film, so engaged that fights were broken out between the debate of Dreyfus and his innocence that it was also one of the first films to get banned in France at the time.

From the late 1890s and 1900s Georges Melies set a lot of groundbreaking moments in both filming and editing. His films were very popular because of the effects and storytelling and the imagination he share with his audience. He help influence many directors such as D.W. Griffith. His films were also a victim of piracy across America due to his popularity around the world. We'll talk about that later, for now there was one thing about Melies that is a weak point and that's his shots.

Much like the other early directors, Melies would only place his camera in one spot and just that one spot alone. I mean sure he would put different sets in his movies and sometimes would shot a scene outside, but never in is films, that I know of, would he move the camera in any of the scenes. Now like I said a lot of early directors did this as well, but by the time the 1910s came along, directors and producers have found and discovered new ways to move the camera along with the set and actors, because of this people were starting to become less interested in Melies' work. So after making over 500 films and having to file for bankruptcy, Melies retired from his directing career in 1914.

After the hard deal of giving up his career, Melies disappeared from the public and work as a toy salesman in Paris near a train station, but by the late 1920's journalists have discovered Melies and his life work and realized how much this man has contributed to film and set the stage for a whole new entertainment. So on December of 1929, Salle Pleyel invented Melies at the gala as they were paying tribute to his work by showing people his films. Melies describe the event as one of the most brilliant moments of his life, and that wasn't all, in 1932, the Cinema Society arranged a place for Melies, his granddaughter and his second wife at the film industry's retirement home in Orly. He stayed at the home until he passed away on January 21th, 1938.

Today Georges Melies is seen as the father of special effects and people are still recognizing him as the starter of narrative and editing in terms of films. People like D.W. Griffith and Walt Disney gave their feelings towards Melies, with Griffith saying he owns everything to him, and Walt Disney saying he discovered the means of placing poetry within the reach of the man in the street.

On 2007, author Brian Selznick published a novel called The Invention of Hugo Cabret that was turned into a movie called Hugo in 2011, that depicts the later life of George Melies as a shop owner.

Today most of Georges Melies movies can be found on YouTube and are available for anyone to watch and download them for free. They are must watch for both an average viewer or a major film buff.


	6. Fun Facts

With the rise of projectors, new theaters and film studios started to rise as well. New theaters such as the Edisonia Vitascope Hall and Nickelodeon would house a wide number of people, and charging them a nickel or a quarter depending on the movie. It was also clear that people were growing tired of day to day real life or news in the theater and they wanted some more narrative films with stories in them. So during the late 1890s to 1900s, more studios started to grow such as William Dickson's American Mutoscope Company, also known as the Biograph Company. Even Melies made his own film studio from a greenhouse-like building.

1896 also saw its first female director, Alice Guy-Blache, originally started off as a secretary she join Gaumont in his new film company, Gaumont Film, and with permission, she went and directed her own narrative films after being inspired by the Lumiere Brothers private screening, she was convince that she can put fiction stories into film. Much like Melies she also introduced some new effects as such running a film backwards and double exposure. She soon moved to America in New York and continue her directing career until 1922 where after she divorced her husband, she had to file bankruptcy and auctioned her film studio. She wasn't that well known as much as Miles was, but she still gain some recognized and got credit where credit was do.

Originally I was going to make animation it's own topic, because I love animation, but sadly I couldn't find that much information on animation during its beginning years to 1910. So this is going to have to go into the fun facts category. Anyway, animation was a thing that happened way before the idea of motion was being research. While not moving, the earliest days of using drawings to tell a story were from places like Iran to Egyptian burial chamber from the BC era. Then from the 1700s to 1800s we would have many inventors trying out different ways on making said drawings move. From Shadow play using cut-out figures and some sort of light. To the Magic Lantern, Flip books, anything they could think of. From 1888, French inventor Charles-Emile Reynaud would develop and patented a projection known as the praxinoscope, which almost looks like a Zoetrope but it has mirrors in the middle and these mirrors would help the image look right when being shown to audiences. There were three cartoons shown, and two out of the three are now lost, and we only have one of these cartoons called Pauvre Pierrot on YouTube. Fast forward to 1900 we have James Blackton's film the Enchanted Drawing the earliest surviving stop motion film in which you would see James drawing some sort of object in a picture and take that same object out from the drawing and becoming real. Then in 1906, he directed what people considered the first animated film recorded, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in which he used both stopped motion and cutout animation.

Finally in 1908, French animator, Emile Cohl was credited as the first hand draw animator with his film Fantasmagorie, in which he draw 700 drawings on paper and shooting the frame onto the negative film. And that's all I've got. Like I said I wish I could find some more info on these animation projects, but this is all I could find.

But don't worry because next chapter we'll be talking about stereotypes.


	7. Black Face

Full Disclaimer: I don't see myself as a expert on this kind of topic. I usually try to stay away from conversational topics like this, because I'm not that good at bringing information on how to go about with them. If there are any facts in this part that I got wrong or you felt I didn't go over them well enough, just let me know because believe me I'll be talking about this topic a lot more later on, but I would also advice that you check out a website call they also go over the topic way better than me and they also give out information on famous African American actors during silent film era.

So with that, enjoy this chapter.

Okay, so we're at the point where we're going into a bit of a sensitive topic. Now I wasn't sure how I was going to deal with this topic and I had many other stereotypes I wanted to talk about, but I'll talk about some of the other stereotypes later. Also just for the record there are many stereotypes outside of the big one that I'll be covering. Stereotypes have been around since art started. Stereotypes are usually one way people would use to make a character by giving that character or a group one specific trait. For example it could something like police loving donuts or girls playing with dolls. Throughout the early years of film these stereotypes were sometimes simple traits that'd been done to death like the tough guy or the guy that looks though but is weak or the girls that look pretty and are always the love interest for the main character. We've seen these tropes all the time in the media and sometimes we still see them today in some cases. Stereotypes doesn't always have a negative effect on people, sometimes it can have a good effect on a certain group of people, but there's the stereotypes that really goes too far when it comes to characterizing a group of people.

The one stereotypes most people are familiar with especially when it comes to early media are stereotypes about African Americans, also known has blackface.

According to a website known as , the person that popularize the Blackface makeup was a white New Yorker name Thomas D. Rice. Rice was the one that made a popular blackface character known as Jim Crow in 1832 when he performed a song known as Jump Jim Crow. The song and the performance was so popular that more white actors started performing in what was known as minstrel shows.

Minstrel shows and blackface were usually a way for whites to characterize African Americans, based on what they believe an African American is like as a race, this became what was like a rule for African Americans that they have to have these types of characters, most of them were depicted as poor and stupid or rude and loud or even that they had to be at least a loyal servant to their white masters. The first film that feature Blackface was Uncle Tom's Cabin released in 1903 by Edwin Porter based on a novel by the same name. The plot of the film I guess is that some white woman is trying to save her daughter from someone and Tom's master protects him from I guess another white master. I kind of don't understand the plot of this film that well, but that's what I'm gathering from this film.

Now keep in mind that whites weren't the only ones in blackface. In fact if an actual African American wanted to perform then they also had to put blackface on or at least act like a certain stereotype that was required for them at the time, but that's not to say that every single film that feature an African American had a stereotype, as the years go by we'll start to see directors and actors trying their best to push pass the stereotypes and try to actually bring out some sort of character with them and there are actual African American actors and directors that will and have become famous during the pre-civil rights era.


	8. A Trip to the Great Train Robbery

So by this point between the 1890s and early 1900s, the film industry was still in its early steps. We still had people just trying to figure how can we run a filming business, how are we going to distribute these films and more importantly, who are these films for.

At the beginning of the 1900s we start to see more theaters, more films being shown in vaudeville houses, amusement arcades. However, people were starting to sick of news sources or films that were just simple things that anyone can do, like feeding a baby or doing their garden and there were still some people that thought that film was just another form of a fad that was going to fade away pretty soon.

Well we have two films that proved those people wrong and these films help set the standard on how films should be made if we're going to make them last longer.

The first film was released on September 1, 1902 called _A Trip to the Moon_ , released by good old Georges Melies.

I've wrote about Georges Melies before and how much of an influence this man was in the movie industry, but this film was something unlike any other films at the time. This was the film that set the standard on how a film showed be made and what movies actually mean.

Georges Melies put all of the work and all of the effects he has learned into this film. This was one of the biggest projects he'd ever worked on. When asked how he came up with the idea, he gave credit to Jules Verne's novels, _From the Earth to the Moon,_ and _Around the Moon,_ for his inspiration for the film. Other film historians also believe that he may have gotten the idea for the film from H.G. Wells's novel, _The First Men in the Moon._ As well as Jacques Offenbach's own opera version of _A Trip to the Moon,_ and an attraction ride at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York that's also call _A Trip to the Moon._

 _A Trip to the Moon_ is often credited as being an early example of sci-fi films as this was the first movie to take place at space which was something no one has ever seen before, and the movie does show it's age in terms of how this movie portrays what space life is like. There's no gravity and all of the people can somehow breathe in space, but it was still a cool concept and I think Melies pick a great subject for this movie.

The film took about 3 months in production and it cost a lot of money for Melies, the budget for the film costed about 10,000 French franc. He used the money to buy the costumes, make the props and sets, and to pay the actors working on the film, which he paid them one Louis d'or per day. According to Melies much of the cost was due to the mechanically operated scenery and the costumes, which Melies himself made sculpted prototypes for the heads, feet, and knee cap pieces, and then he created plaster molds for them.

For the effects, Melies used the ones that he's been using during his days as a director, such as the stop trick I've mentioned before, he also used a tracking shot which he used previously for a short film called _The Man with the Rubber Head._

After Melies was done with the production of the film, he began to show his film in a fairground in May of 1902. When the film was shown, audiences went crazy for the film, there were so many encores and enthusiasm from them that the person that Melies allowed him to show his film for free, purchase the film immediately.

From September through December of 1902, hand-color prints of the film were also made and shown at Melies's Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris. Later Melies began selling both black and white and color versions of the film from between 560 and 1000 French franc. He also sold it through Charles Urban's Warwick Trading Company in London, but the main country he was aiming for to sell his films was America, but the film was pirated from many American film companies like Edison Manufacturing company. So to solve the piracy problem, Georges had his brother Gaston Melies to set up an American branch of the Star Film company in New York and to make sure that the people only purchase the original films from Melies himself and not some pirated company.

Although the pirated films would later play a part in Melies's bankruptcy, the film was still very popular and it's still popular to this day. The movie itself was use in a song by the Smashing Pumpkins called, _Tonight, Tonight._ And this movie was undeniably the film that set a lot of grounds for how a movie should be made.

But _A Trip to the Moon_ wasn't the only popular film from the 1900s, Director Edwin S. Porter also knew from watching _A Trip to the Moon_ that people wanted some form of fictional story so he made a film that also innovated a couple of new techniques. The film he made, called _The Great Train Robbery,_ was the first film were the film was shot from a real railroad, it was filmed at the Lackawanna railroad in New Jersey which is where most film studios were located at the time. So this was one of first films to use a new way of filming called location shooting.

This was also the first film to use a new technique called cross-cutting. Cross-cutting is basically when something is happening in a one scene and then we see another thing happening in another scene happening at the same time. For instance, in this film we start off the film of a group of bandits forcing a telegraph operator to write a false report and telling the engineer to take in water at this station instead of the station they usually stop at, after that they tie the operator up and leave him behind to rob the train. Later while the bandits are robbing the train and getting away, we see the operator's daughter finding her father and helping him break free from the rope and the father goes to a dance hall and alerts the sheriff at there's been a robbery and they go after the bandits. It was also the first film to have the camera panning to the characters in this case it's the bandits.

When the film was released on December 1st, 1903. It was met with the same praise and applause that _A Trip to the Moon_ received, this film had story, it had characters, it had actions, it was the film that people were looking for. It's considered to be an early Western and Action film and it had many remakes after it was premiere. In fact, the same director for this movie, Porter, had made a parody of the film known as _The Little Train Robbery,_ and in this film it's actually a bunch of kids that are robbing children on a miniature train and they steal their candy and dolls, must be a slow day for the kids.

Anyway after _A Trip to the Moon_ and _The Great Train Robbery_ directors now finally have the answer on how to make filming a business, and of courses like any business, it'll include some business deals, rivals, and locations.


End file.
